Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori talked with 13 Chinese students studying business management at Waseda University, whom he had invited to the Prime Minister's Official Residence. He told the young people, "You have the important role of acting as a bridge between Japan and China in the twenty-first century. I hope that exchange among the young people who will spearhead the next generation will continue to promote and will lead to Sino-Japanese relations based on deep mutual understanding."
The Prime Minister's first cabinet post was minister of education, to which he was appointed in December 1983. Convinced that building individual goodwill was the key to all relationships of trust, he decided to double the number of government-scholarship Chinese students in Japan to 500. He was the first minister of education to visit China (in 1984), at which time both sides agreed to step up student exchange. Today, 16 years later, almost 26,000 Chinese, including 1,700 government-scholarship recipients, are studying in Japan, while close to 15,000 Japanese are studying in China. Incidentally, the press corps covering the meeting included Jiang Zheng (Mayumi Fukuzawa), a reporter for a Japanese commercial network who had first come to Japan as a Chinese student.